TEDxAdelaide News

Following the success of previous TEDx events in Adelaide and a demonstrated interest for more, we’re bringing TEDx back to this wonderful city in 2015. With an exciting new venue in the heart of the city, involvement from community entrepreneurs, professionals and Uni SA students, TEDxAdelaide 2015 is shaping up to be an incredible event.

OUR SPEAKERS

Amanda Daniel

Amanda is a Food Consultant with 33 years’ experience at the sharp end of the hospitality industry in Australia and overseas. A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu school in London, and ex-CEO of Australia’s leading farmers’ market organisation, Amanda has been a cookery lecturer, restaurateur, chef, food stylist, business owner, writer and event manager. She brings a business mind to menu design and a global eye to menu development. Specialising in regional food, she is currently, amongst other projects, delivering a regional dining strategy for the Barossa and Light Region.

Do you know what chicken tastes like? Amanda will talk about how our food is evolving and how flavour is being diluted and redefined. We need to educate our taste buds or we will end up with a homogenous, flavourless future — and we won’t even know it! If we want nourishing food, we need to know what flavour is. Then we can decide what the future will taste like!

David Paton

David Cleland Paton has devoted his life to science and educated many hundreds of South Australians who work in conservation. His passions are many, though it is the ecology and behaviour of birds that drives this Associate Professor of environmental science, a Director of BioR and chair of Birds SA, one of the state’s largest environmental NGOs.

Cleland Wildlife Park and other protected reserves used to be all about protecting habitat for wildlife (and nature for our own needs). This is no longer enough and more than half the woodland birds of the Mount Lofty Ranges are in danger of being lost to us forever. We are to blame and it is clear how we got here. So how can people help these birds to survive? David’s idea might just be simple enough to work.

Dr. Elizabeth Grant

Dr Elizabeth Grant is an architectural anthropologist at the University of Adelaide and an international expert in the design of prisons. She has been involved in many prison design projects, nationally and internationally with the aim of reducing ‘the pains of imprisonment’ through good design.

Successive South Australian governments have expanded prisons by adding more cells under the ‘pack ’em, rack ’em and stack ’em’ mentality. Many members of the public believe that prison accommodation should be consistent with punishment. Elizabeth’s talk will discuss the shortcomings of such an approach and present ideas for a better way to design prisons.

Dr. Huu Kim Le

Dr Huu Kim Le is an Australian Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Advanced Trainee. Kim recently conducted an investigation at the Institute of Mental Health in Singapore on Internet gaming. This work aligns with his passion for helping others enjoy gaming in a healthy way, something central to the clinic and website he has established to increase Internet gaming and health awareness.

Growing up, Kim loved computer games. A meeting with a mentally ill patient that shared their illness behaviour with their avatar inspired Kim to become a psychiatrist, including study at the University of Adelaide, before he went on to work in teenage internet gaming addiction clinics in Asia. Kim wants to spread the idea that regardless of the real world or the online world, the worlds of children matter. He would like to share his experience of working with children to ask the provocative question “Do babies really need the Internet?”

Dr. James Muecke

James is an eye surgeon based in Adelaide. James has a special interest in blindness prevention in the developing world and is Chairman and co-founder of Sight For All. He received an ‘Outstanding service to the prevention of blindness’ award by the Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology in 2011. He was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012 and received a South Australian Community Achievement Award in 2013. In 2015, James was the national recipient of the Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

James will be talking about the beauty of our sight and how saving sight in the developing world can help to save lives and break the circle of poverty and accelerate economic development. Importantly, he will share his unique ideas on how we can achieve this.

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field

Karen is the Director and Associate Professor of the newly established ‘Centre for Digital Video Intelligence’ which is an industry-supported academic research centre dedicated to the fast growing ad:tech sector, operating within the University of South Australia. Karen has a PhD in marketing science and is a global authority in digital advertising and media strategy. Her work has been noted in Forbes, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC and many others and she has spoken at some of the most prestigious conferences in the world including Cannes Film Festival, New York AdWeek and Festival of Media Global.

Karen’s idea is that innovation is like a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ and that being innovative in any guise does NOT mean accepting the norms. It’s about forging your own path despite the ‘moles’ that might pop up along the way to dampen your dreams.

Luke Broomhall

Luke is a registered psychologist with a background in forensic psychology and organisational consulting. Luke provides expert medico-legal reports and testimony in criminal matters and has given evidence in the Supreme, District, Federal Magistrates and Youth Courts of South Australia.

Child sexual abuse can cause catastrophic damage. While resources deservedly go into policing and education, little is focused on the men indicating a sexual preference for under-age children. Luke’s idea explores the latest approaches to treatment of perpetrators and the need for a mature debate about a topic many of us would rather not discuss.

Maddie Kelly

Maddie Kelly is the Social Justice Coordinator at St Aloysius College, working with students who are committed to making a difference in our community. She is passionate about communication and strives to tell human stories in a way that empowers and motivates others to take action against injustice.

The Japanese art of Kintsukuroi is repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer, and recognising that only through being damaged could the piece have been improved. When we connect with those who have experienced extraordinary suffering, we can truly learn the value of pain, love and hope – and we find that these are common human experiences. Imagine how much more beautiful and rich the world would appear if we found happiness in life’s simple treasures, and shared stories with one another free of judgement; our part of the world could become the most beautiful, authentic Kintsukuroi artform to ever exist.

Mary Freer

Over many years Mary has contributed to Australia’s national health and social care reform agenda through her work with government agencies, including in senior leadership positions with national government and not-for-profit health care and social welfare services. Mary is also the Director of Freerthinking and the founder and CEO of Change Day Australia. Mary was recently named by The Edge (NHS) as one of the top 100 Global Health Leaders to follow on Twitter @FreerMary. In our weary health and community service system, Change Day gathered over 56,000 pledges. That’s an enormous amount of goodwill and energy.

During Mary’s talk she will discuss how social movement strategies can bring about frontline change to any organisation or community, large or small.

Matt Anderson

Matt has been a leader in the social impact space for almost 20 years – as an organisational development leader, network chair of various cross sector collaborative efforts, and an NGO executive. He has worked at both the grass roots level as well as in a national and international capacity – including with one of the world’s largest civil society organisations, World Vision. He understands the synergy between social vision and commercial acumen – as well as the broad collaboration needed across multiple sectors to achieve outcomes of significant scale and scope.

Social capital is a term which can mean different things to different people and it will play an significant role in the development of communities. Matt will be joined on stage with Kristin Alford and together they will discuss the importance of connections, having bold ideas of global relevance and what it means to create social capital with benefits to our community.

Mel Greig

Mel was a teen runaway who struggled with peer pressure after moving from the farm to the city in South Australia at the age of 12. Mel has worked for the biggest radio networks in Australia as an announcer, producer and voiceover artist over the past 15 years. She was co-host of the nation’s most popular night program ‘The Hot 30 Countdown’ both on radio and television. It was on this program she became involved with the ‘Royal Hoax’’ phone call which she describes as a “life-changing experience”.

Mel is very passionate about online trolling, an issue that greatly affects the mental health of many people in our community. She will be using her personal experiences to discuss the ways in which people are being subjected to trolling online, the current laws and guidelines surrounding the issue, as well as her ideas around what we can do to combat the issue.

Mickey O’Brien

As an Aboriginal person and descendant of the Kaurna (Adelaide Plains) and Narrunga (York Peninsula) peoples, providing cultural advice has been a responsibility passed down to Mickey by his father, well-known Kaurna elder, Lewis O’Brien. Mickey has been representing Aboriginal cultural issues for a number of years now, and it is a position he honours and respects, delivering with honesty and a balanced approach.

Mickey will be talking about what today’s Australia can learn about welcoming others, taking his inspiration from more than 2000 generations of Aboriginal people.

Peter Drew

Peter was born in 1983 in Adelaide. He holds a Masters Degree from the Glasgow School of Art. His artworks have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia, though his most prominent work is installed on city streets.

Peter is a proud of our multiculturalism and believes it is under threat. He would like to find out if Australia has still has the ‘courage to combine’, or if have we become a gutless country.

Raymond Spencer

Mr Raymond Spencer was born in Adelaide and studied at the University of Adelaide. Raymond has extensive business experience derived from living and working in the USA, India and 16 other countries. Raymond has advised corporations and not-for-profit groups on organisational, cultural, and leadership initiatives and is currently the Chair of SAHMRI, the SA Economic Development Board, Capgemini’s Financial Services Global Business Unit and he remains a director of Rubicon Technology.

Raymond’s idea, based on his international business experiences, is that the model for the future community is to benchmark at a global level and that our competition is not around the corner it is from everywhere and anywhere.

Richard Turner

Richard Turner is a serial entrepreneur, having founded four successful companies across completely different industries. Using these entrepreneurial skills, he has taken ZEN through two years of 600% growth during the Global Financial Crisis, building the business from a start-up into Australia’s leading renewable energy company with specialist divisions in Residential, Business and Utility-scale Power Systems.

Richard’s idea worth sharing is around the greatest renewable energy source in the world and what that could mean for the future of South Australia and the world. His talk will continue to grow this discussion from more than just an energy conversation to prosperity on graphene, batteries and electric vehicles.

Tanya Monro

Professor Tanya Monro is Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Innovation and an ARC Georgina Sweet Laureate Fellow at the University of South Australia. Tanya was the inaugural Director of the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) from 2008 to 2014 and was also the inaugural Director for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP) at the University of Adelaide.

Tanya obtained her PhD in physics in 1998 from The University of Sydney, for which she was awarded the Bragg Gold Medal for the best Physics PhD in Australia. In 2000, she received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton in the UK. She came to the University of Adelaide in 2005 as inaugural Chair of Photonics. She has published over 500 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and raised over $140M for research. Her talk will be on the intriguing topics of beauty and science.

PERFORMERS

Kaurna Cronin

Recently awarded the 2015 Folk Alliance Youth Award, along with the prestigious 2014 APRA-AMCOS Emily Burrows Award, recipient of Best Acoustic Act at the Fowler’s SA Music Awards and nominated for Best Male at the 2015 SA Music Awards. This wandering storyteller is on the cusp of a new breed of Australian DIY folk artists, reimagining and redeveloping the way music is shared, written and enjoyed across the globe. Kaurna will be performing by local thoughts, global travels and musical growth.

Experience grows strong in the heart of the wondering traveller, as distant roads create life’s tantalizing memories and moments that are transfixed into the solidity of song and melody. No passage is truer than in the presence of Australian singer songwriter Kaurna Cronin – With grand story-telling, folk jams and a lyrical sincerity beyond his 23 years, Cronin’s unique folk blend and moving performances have been capturing audiences throughout Europe and Australia, establishing this young singer songwriter as an emerging international sensation.

Oliver White

Oliver White is the solo project of Angela Schilling, a musician, producer and feminist from Adelaide. One third of minimal pop trio Swimming, Angela is motivated by lyricism, textures and spaces within sound. Oliver White’s debut recording was released in October 2015 under Melbourne label Healthy Tapes.

Oliver White is a project that revolves around energy and power, both losing and gaining. Angela will perform two songs that talk about these relationships and the vulnerability of being a tiny part of nature.

TEDxADELAIDE 2015 MC

Tory Shepherd

Tory Shepherd is The Advertiser’s Political Editor and a columnist with a keen interest in social justice, feminism, and science as well as different forms of bunkum. She was acting editor for national opinion website The Punch as well as a senior reporter at News Corporation before returning to The Advertiser about three years ago. She can be seen on ABC’s Insiders, Sunrise, Mornings, Sky News and The Chaser’s Media Circus and heard fairly regularly on ABC radio. She now splits her time between Adelaide and Canberra and anywhere with submarines.